A few days ago, I wrote a post entitled “Will FM3-24 fight piracy (the RIAA kind, not the swashbuckling kind)?” in which I criticized the fact that policing music, movie, or software piracy was even on the COIN Center’s radar when it was unclear that the military was getting the basics of counterinsurgency right. Today, I came across a funny anecdote in Paula Broadwell’s All In. During then-General Petraeus’s last weeks in Afghanistan, Senators McCain, Graham, and Lieberman were in Kabul for a Fourth of July dinner with Preident Karzai:

The senators and Petraeus had dinner that evening with Karzai. At one point, the Afghan leader mentioned that he loved a song that he thought was called “Down on the Bayou.” After dinner, Petraeus put his communications team on it. His aides quickly found the tune–“Born on the Bayou,” by Creedence Clearwater Revival. For Petraeus, it brought back memories of Cadet Hops at West Point in 1972. His team burned a CD of Creedence’s greatest hits, and Petraeus gave it to Karzai two days later. The president beamed.

Petraeus’s aids could have bought all the songs on iTunes (or whatever service–I’m an Amazon guy myself), but there’s a part of me that hopes that these greatest hits were put together from various ill-gotten MP3s in staff member’s laptops. Either way, I love that anecdote. I hope the Taliban are Creedance fans!

As for Broadwell’s book, I am almost all the way through it. Frankly, I’m underwhelmed. The narrative is pretty drab (olive?), and Broadwell has a talent for making the most intense fire fights tedious. However, I may be simply sick of reading about warrior-intellectuals and the f’-ups of Afghanistan. If you are truly interested in Petraeus’s education, The Fourth Star is a much more readable version of the same basic narrative of genius generals and counterinsurgency. There are some interesting ‘corrections’ and political ‘readjustments’ of that COIN narrative, though. At any rate, I’ll take a more thoughtful poke at the book once I start articulating my thoughts in the dissertation.

“If by chance you were to ask me which ornaments I would desire above all others in my house, I would reply, without much pause for reflection, arms and books.”
—Fra Sabba da Castiglione, Knight of St. John